How long would she have lasted with so extensive a spawning memory? Might the first of our kind have been like me? Had being extracted by the man involved in her memory had any effect? To imagine him destroying her without first investigating the countless possibilities, without allowing his staff—hand-selected for their passion—to study the only Mem related to the father of extraction science, added a horrible weight to his confession. Each time I thought my mind had exhausted the questions, there came another. Because knowing him as I did, as a loving man without prejudice, I could not help imagining what he must have said—and I could not imagine a scenario in which he hadn’t spoken—while she died.

I studied him: his face and countenance; his posture. I waited, half expecting him to change, to shift before my very eyes as he certainly must now.

“Were you happy when it was done?” I asked. “Are you now?”

“I was as happy as I could be.” His heavy hands slid down my arms and away, whatever reservation I tried to contain falling as well.

It occurred to me in that moment that I would have to choose to keep him as the Professor I knew and understood. That I could. Because his confession was not solely born of immodesty, out of a desire to be taken from his pedestal; he had carried this secret for years, first taking it from his wife and then having to keep it from her. Unlike the others who knew, he was with Camille every day. The hope she’d lost had been his, too. He hadn’t extracted the memories of their dead child from himself, nor had he extracted the memory of silencing her Mem. He kept a portrait of what began it in a locked place, preserved for stolen glances. I was hearing all of this to share his burden. To be his confidante. An honor that none but he and Camille had thought me worthy.

“At least,” I began, nodding my eventual certainty before the sentence was spoken, “your work has done what you intended it to. You’ve spared Camille and others the hurt that might have killed them.”